I was getting teary sitting in a musty old synagogue in a hardscrabble neighborhood of Lieben on the outskirts of Prague that a group of local activists is struggling to save. We lucked out by stumbling onto a Rosh Hashonah service at this old place thanks to a friend's internet search.
Looking up at the ceiling of that ancient building, bolstered from collapse by cross beam steel joists, with Hebrew letters missing from above the torah arch, I'm sure I was not the only one thinking about the 77,000 murdered Jews of Prague and how relics like this might have been all that was left if Hitler had won.
The service was presided over by a visiting rabbi from Israel and a charismatic activist working on the restoration of this synagogue and the preservation of Czech Jewish history - Sylvie Whitmann, a Czech native and the founder of Whitmann Tours, a Jewish heritage tour business. See http://www.wittmann-tours.com/
Our final morning in Prague we were in the Jewish quarter looking at heartbreaking drawings by children in a camp on their way to being murdered. That evening, in a bustling restaurant in Dresden, it was hard not to wonder what the 80 something German guy at the next table was doing 60 years ago.
Having said that - Dresden is a beautiful, vibrant, accessible city on the move
. . . with lots of building going on.
On a bus tour the guide suddenly says "and on the left is a villa owned by one of Hitler's friends that ironically the bombs missed and hit the building next door". He went on to remind us that Allied planes bombed Dresden for 5 days - 35,000 known dead, not including refugees from other German war zones - awful to say -but no tears were welling up inside me.
Berlin was next.
Berlin is a City haunted by its ever present historical ghosts - they lived with Hitler for 12 years from 1933-45
and then under the communists from 1945-89 with the Berlin Wall going up in 1961
After Hitler was defeated a communist government decided that too many people wanted to get the hell out of East Berlin and one morning Berliners awoke to find themselves fenced in by barbed wire followed by a concrete wall with the promise of being shot if they tried to leave.
Now at Checkpoint Charlie in Berlin young German actors dressed up as American Gis pose with giggling tourists. You can also drive around Berlin in a caravan of Soviet era cars with an actor dressed up as an East German cop pretending to check your papers.
A huge stretch of what remains of the wall has been turned over to mural artists
The war memorial to the murdered Jews of Europe is in the heart of Berlin. It's a couple of blocks from the Brandenburg gate and consists of an undulating sea of large gray tombstone like blocks.
The graffiti resistant chemical coating on the side of the blocks was made by one of the companies that made death camp poison gas. When this controversy erupted the company tore up their bill.
The memorial was inspired by the visual chaos of tombstones, that seem to be bursting out of the cramped Jewish cemetery in Prague on top of 12 layers of graves.
The ground around the rows of gray blocks slopes down to the entrance of an underground memorial to the murdered Jews of Europe.
Crowds move in bone chilling silence past well done exhibits laying out a narrative, in English and German, of all available details of the rounding up and the mass murders
There is a room with notes and letters from the doomed with final desparate pleas to loved ones. Some notes were thrown from packed cattle cars on the way to death camps. This is followed by a room with individual and group portraits with the historical details of wiped out Jewish families.
The new Jewish Museum in Berlin, designed by architect Daniel Liebeskind, uses the building itself and its haunting discordant interiors to convey the story of a genocidal shattering of lives, the disappearance of a culture and the physical void left behind.
Liebskind's architectural narrative is powerful but was not well integrated with the story told by the flow of the exhibits and the artifacts of daily Jewish life which are almost overwhelming in volume.
This is the walking surface of a long narrow chamber of the museum piled with heavy gauge steel disks, each in the shape of faces of different sizes, with mouths open in varied expressions of crying out. As visitors walk in silence down this dead end corridor every footstep produces a loud haunting clanging as if the souls of the murdered are being heard from. Profoundly moving.
It feels like there was limited, if any, collaboration between Liebeskind and the curators as if he said, "here is my masterpiece and now good luck filling it with all the stuff you have".
One of the historical displays in the glass dome on top of the Reichstag refers to the Hitler years as the National Socialist Tyranny. Sorry guys - a tyranny means no consent of the governed. The faces of the adoring, saluting, cheering crowds in films of Hitler rallies don’t look like victims of tyranny. That only changed when they started to lose.
According to some young Berlin expats we visited - one Jewish- the feeling in Berlin is that Germans have tried to do the right thing with an unflinching embrace of their ghastly past with every school child required to visit a concentration camp - unlike Poland, Czechoslovakia and Austria.
My fantasy is a world in which the words "never again" mean something. Where a multinational force of troops, known as the "UN Never Again Force" lead by Israel and Germany would have been there to stop genocide in Bosnia, Rwanda and Darfur and whereever the lessons of the holocaust are forgotten.
Two members of a new generation head off to school in Berlin
